Many utility providers experience a shortage of resources due to increasing consumer demand, and more specifically, increasing demands for the resources. For example, generating plants are often unable to meet power demands resulting from an electricity load demanded by many consumers at the same time.
Presently, in an attempt to reduce high demands, many utility providers have instituted time of use rates which include higher rates for resource usage during on-times and lower rates for resource usage during off-times. However, these time of use rates are only incentives and therefore rely on the consumer to curtail his own energy usage.
Therefore, there is a need to provide a system to automatically reduce the instantaneous load demand for a resource.